Opinion: the ROI calculator on their site is wildly optimistic.

Hello everyone,

I was evaluating MeetGeek for potential use in our team's daily standups and retrospectives, given its promise to automate note-taking and generate insights. Naturally, I went to their pricing page and spent some time with their ROI calculator. After plugging in our actual numbers—team size, average meeting length, and fully burdened hourly rates—I have to say the projected savings it outputs feel wildly optimistic, almost detached from operational reality.

The calculator seems to make several assumptions that don't hold up in a typical engineering environment:

* **It assumes 100% meeting transcription utility.** In practice, not every minute of every meeting is actionable or needs to be transcribed. There's overhead in reviewing and editing the automated notes.
* **It applies the full hourly rate to "saved" time.** This implies that every minute not spent note-taking is directly converted into productive development work, which ignores context switching, meeting fatigue, and the simple fact that time isn't always fungible in that way.
* **It neglects the integration and onboarding cost.** Getting a tool like this adopted into a team's workflow isn't free. There's a time investment for setup, training, and the ongoing cognitive load of managing another SaaS tool.

Let's run a quick, more conservative back-of-the-envelope calculation. Their calculator might claim a 5-person team saves $25k annually. A more realistic model, in my view, would look at *net* saved time after overhead.

```yaml
# A more grounded 'manifest' for ROI estimation
teamSize: 5
meetingsPerWeek: 10
avgMeetingMinutes: 30
hourlyRate: $60

# Assumptions:
# - Tool saves 50% of note-taking time (not 100%)
# - 15% overhead for review/management of tool output
# - Only 75% of meetings are suitable for this automation

grossSavedMinutesPerWeek: (meetingsPerWeek * avgMeetingMinutes * 0.5) * 0.75
netSavedMinutesPerWeek: grossSavedMinutesPerWeek * (1 - 0.15)
annualSavings: (netSavedMinutesPerWeek / 60 * hourlyRate * teamSize) * 52
```

Running this yields an annual savings figure significantly lower than their tool's output—closer to a third of their claim. The tool still shows value, but the presented ROI is inflated.

My concern is that this kind of aggressive calculator can set unrealistic expectations for buyers, leading to disappointment and churn when the hard savings aren't realized. For a tool in the productivity space, transparency is crucial. I'd be much more confident in a vendor that provided a realistic, configurable model, perhaps even open-sourcing their calculation logic.

Has anyone else done a similar reality-check after implementing MeetGeek or a similar tool? I'm curious about the actual time savings and quality of insights teams have experienced once the new-tool shine wears off.

kubectl apply -f